Towards Song

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

This paper combines the separate but overlapping interests of its authors – one a composer and sound-artist, who often works with voice and word; the other a poet with an interest in how page-based poetry is actually read – in an enquiry into the performance of lyric poetry and its relations to song. The enquiry owes at least as much to the studio, to sound-editing software, to close listening and close reading as it does to existing literature on connected topics. The main precedent is Douglas Oliver’s 1989 publication, Poetry and Narrative in Performance, in which the author adopts the word performance to refer to any act of reading, whether aloud or silent. Like Oliver, the authors rely on the visual representations of the sound-shapes of specific sounded readings and also rely on access to sound files of some of the readings and their manipulations. In addition to the analytic value of having access to recordings and wave-forms and spectrograms, the authors experimented with using software (Audacity and Melodyne) to make subtle changes in pitch, pulling particular vowel sounds from their original positions to the nearest notes in a tempered scale. These experiments test, perhaps, a border-zone between lyric poetry and sung lyric. They also suggest a possible value for poets in using such software as support for their technologically unaided ears in testing out their own compositions.